Many, many ideas. The best ideas. Anti-authoritarian, non-hierarchical, mixtures of practical, arts, and sciences education, with a lot of time spent on communication, conflict resolution, and collective decision making. But heck, if that’s too much, let’s start by allocating the same amount of money per child (pro-rated for existing economic differences between regions) and see where that takes us.
But saying “oh yeah? Who’s gonna decide? We’ll never get agreement” takes us nowhere.
That suggesting equal equitable education–hey, the three Es!–immediately raises objections and opposition says a great deal about inequality and its preservation in Canada and the US.
intellectuals can also be bad ass but in a non physical way but still bullies. I believe that it is a natural instinct of man to seek power and status. We seek it wherever we can. I don’t think any group is immune to having their fair share of bullies.
The problem is, if you see too many assholes and/or idiots in power it becomes extremely difficult to convince others to take another path. As I have said before, you cannot push a “right vs. wrong” argument on people with a “win vs. lose” mentality and hope to get too far.
I don’t know if it’s as simple as better education. When I was in school I encountered a lot of people openly hostile to the idea of learning. The education was there for them to have, but they didn’t want it.
I do think that there is vast room for improvement in the way that we educate our children – that someday we will have methods based more rigorously on the way the human brain develops. Having said that, to date, I’m not aware of anything encouraging by way of historical precedent. Weimar Germany had some of the best general education in the world at the time.
To the degree that “best” means “my kids will get jobs where they get to boss other people around or make tons of money at the expense of others,” yeah, that’s a problem and it’s one reason education reform is difficult.
That’s what makes teaching an art: motivating people to think. It takes time, small class sizes, teacher autonomy, training, all of which takes money. Which is why it is rare. It’s not because it is not possible.
It is also rare because those in power rarely like the idea of real education for people. They want, design, and implement education systems that turn out willing cannon fodder, dutiful workers, and complacent consumers.
I graduated second in my high school class and I didn’t learn to think critically until college. This is definitely a gap in education.
I think some people confuse being exposed to an idea with being indoctrinated. When I was in grad school we read stuff by conservative thinkers because it was important to understand those arguments. It’s not like they told us what to think and we believed it. Those discussions were led by students. For those of us who were very progressive it just reinforced our thinking about such issues. Usually people seek out those subjects because of what they already believe. The idea that kids are coming into college with a blank slate of personal beliefs and are only presented liberal ideas is ridiculous.
But some people fear anyone developing critical thinking skills, because people with those skills are harder to control.
Maybe to an extent. But I think there is a lot of genetics involved. Some people seem to be born with brains that enjoy learning and discovering new things. Others, not so much, and as @Ulfreida says, “half the population is below average in intelligence”.
Not to get into arguments about IQ tests here, but it is an objective fact that some people are more intellectually capable than others. And of course I realize the dangers implicit in admitting this: eugenics and other horrors.
The environmental factors are strong too. If a person has been brought up in a very prescriptive world-view, it’s going to be hard to get them interested in critical thinking. “That’s not what ma & pa, or the preacher, taught me”.
I’m not sure from where you are, but just in school following the GCSE standard, we learnt critical thinking in a vast range of subjects. Biology, Mathematics, English Lit., Chemistry. All involved critical thinking.
Maybe early stage woodwork and pottery (both required classes*) did not - though I have a 3 inch scar on my left hand that reminds me to use critical thought
* using a chisel where using a router would have been a much better plan.
Completely off topic, but I once lived in a house with roomates, and one of the guys had a girlfriend who was very pleasant but had no mechanical skills.
And for some reason I now forget, she needed to remove a wood screw from something, and I discovered she had ‘borrowed’ a rather good wood chisel from my toolbox to use as a screwdriver!
It took a great deal of self-control to bite my tongue and say politely, er, that’s not the right tool for the job. Why don’t you ask me if you need a tool in future?
I guess English applied in my case. I was in AP English and took college English courses. But I consider thinking critically about literature to be much different than thinking critically about, say, a specific policy or even a philosophical idea. When I say critical thinking I mean the ability to identity an idea, consider its context, merits, pitfalls, whether or not it’s factual or opinion, and in the case of science to test its assumptions.
I went to a rural Michigan school system for 4th-12th. I think the closest I ever got to critical thinking was an 8th grade history teacher who tried to contextualize where we were in US history and critically evaluate decisions made by our government. We learned about the genocide of natives and the Holocaust (with pictures, ugh.) She reinforced a lot how the power of nations rises and falls and posited it was all downhill for the US. A lot of what she said was very prescient, I’m afraid.
For the vast majority of my schooling it was very much, learn the answer, regurgitate the answer.
One of the challenges here is how education quality varies widely depending on where you live.
When I attended university it was like a whole new universe. I could learn about anything I wanted to, and I was so into that, I forgot to take my core classes, oops. I attended with a lot of people who were privileged and private-school educated and there was a lot of, “You didn’t know that??”